


None of our secrets are physical

by Nerve_Itch



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood, DOLCE, Digestivo, Dubious Consent, M/M, Muskrat Farm, Non-consensual bathing, Restraints, S3 spoilers, Slight genital torture, This is the opposite of a fix-it fic, Torture, Unconsciousness, Water Torture, Wound kissing, injuries, non con themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:56:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4385708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerve_Itch/pseuds/Nerve_Itch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Will finds himself lifted, feels each boned joint of finger elevating him to a point of vertigo, feels his legs swinging heavily over the arch of a forearm, and his head is a storm moving in stop motion. His body reverberates with footfalls. It’s flying and it’s drowning simultaneously and Will knows if he were to open his eyes again he’d see that he was still earthbound, but the thought offers scant reassurance. </i> </p>
<p> <br/>OR, <br/>Those three times in Dolce and Digestivo that Will appeared to have been bathed and dressed without his consent. Spoilers, and other warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	None of our secrets are physical

**Author's Note:**

> This seems like a very good place to elaborate on the detail that non-consensual bathing has been used here as a metaphor so thin it barely qualifies as a metaphor.

 1. 

_Florence_

 

Will watches as the furnishings of the apartment grow auras; reds and ochres and smudges of light that stretch toward each other, toward him. They flex and contract in tandem with the sluggish drag of his heart still trying to beat, and Will thinks the effort of his blood sprawling through his veins is unwarranted. He’s looking at his shoulder, at the way it’s leaking; sprung too many holes in him now for fixing. If he were on dry land, he could just be quietly left to be discarded, repurposed and it wouldn’t _hurt_. Instead, he has the sensation of being at sea, and of his vessel slowly sinking.

There’s a shadow obstructing the reds and fires and wet skin in his vision and it’s not just darkness that’s moving towards him. It’s antimatter, pulling the light and mass of the room into its core as it moves closer to Will, looms and draws heat out of him in waves and tells him _you are supposed to feel this_.

Will lets his eyelids fall closed and guesses the voice is talking about the hot metal still striking against sinew and bone in his shoulder joint, still blooming and colouring his immediate landscape with an intensity of pain that he’s learnt to associate with the same shadow that’s now gripping him.

The shadow is telling Will to open his eyes, and Will remembers, now, why he tried to sever himself from this creature, as he feels his eyelids lift up before he considers that he didn’t _have_ to. He doesn’t feel separated from it now, with its cool fingers pulling at the shreds of damp cloth, and he feels suffocated by it when he’s pulled forward and the rest of the shirt peels away from his skin, dragging against congealed parts of him.

He thinks he should be shivering but his muscles won’t make the movement.

His name sings in the air in dulled notes and it isn’t calling him to any place he wants to go. He feels like he’s been dropped from the sky as his air rushes his skin, until his back makes contact with the coarse fibres of cushions stitched for ornamentation, not comfort. He’s feeling every indent of embroidered florid pattern pressing into skin as his head readjusts to a new centre of gravity. Pressure groups in pockets around the long slice scar of his belly and Will expects it to open at the touch, to smile at the one who gifted it. His skin remains knotted together in scars more resilient than his thoughts, and the pressure sinks down to the button of his trousers. His hands won’t move; he’s watching himself reach towards the shadow and grip its wrists and pull himself to safety, and when he opens his eyes his hands are still lying limp and open at his sides, and his trousers have been swallowed by the shadow. A sound like _no_ crawls from his mouth, insect-like and insubstantial. He knows that muttered protests won’t do a thing to sway the intentions of his shadow, and wonders if he’s only saying it to remind himself that he has an opinion of what will happen to him, even when his agency has been swallowed.

“You cannot walk.”

Will blinks, feels his eyes whetted by the movement, and watches the shadow gain the hues and textures of a person, and this is how he knows the drug in his system is lying to him. The thing he wanted to kill was not human, and yet this manifestation of Hannibal is holding him with flesh covered fingers and an expression made with skin and a gloss to the eyes that don’t belong in any black holes.

Will finds himself lifted, feels each boned joint of finger elevating him to a point of vertigo, feels his legs swinging heavily over the arch of a forearm, and his head is a storm moving in stop motion as his body reverberates with footfalls. It’s flying and it’s drowning simultaneously and Will knows if he were to open his eyes again he’d see that he was still earthbound, and the thought is scant reassurance.

His toes knock into something solid, and Will looks; sees a wall and the dark paint of its surface swirling as the wall swings open. He hears the word _sorry_ and he answers it with a breath that was supposed to sounds like a laugh; an expulsion of air to express incredulity that either his shadow or Hannibal or whatever is gripping him right now would alert his senses to the details of his agony, and then apologise for any surplus distress that was not manufactured.

Will is arranged on the ground, lets his head roll onto tiles too bright for what he’s feeling, cold and stinging his skin. He’s grateful for the view this way; he’s watching blurs of darkness cross the white, and listening to a roar of water charging against a solid surface, and he’s not looking at himself, naked, and knowing that he’s lost all sense of secrecy. Whatever things he’d kept pinned inside his skin, his _self_ , they’re exposed now; leaking from the bullet wound, splayed and shaking through the pores of his skin, laid out like a banquet that he didn’t prepare.

The water hisses, now, a surge of biblical flooding and if he could move his face enough to smile, he would; the thought of drowning, submerging beneath a tide seems safe. It’s a cloak, if nothing else. The inevitability of losing swells in him like a comfort, because now, he understands. He watches the dark shape as it bends over him, and knows that it’s too dense to be a shadow. He knows that the thing dragging him upwards, pulling at his shoulder in a way that scratches cries from the back of his throat, it’s nothing so harmless as a simple darkness. It’s Hannibal, and it’s everything that Hannibal entails. It’s always been Hannibal, and Will knows, as his skin breaks through the surface of the water and rests against the ceramic of the bathtub, that neither Hannibal nor a shadow could have been killed by him. Some horrors will remain undefeatable, and Will only wishes that he could have pulled this one out from under his skin before it had a chance to undo him from the inside.

“You understand the need to savour things, I think.”

Will doesn’t.

Skin skims his forehead, and Will feels each ridge of fingertip as it dances across the indentations and abrasions. They hum over the unbroken skin, and screech when they hit open wounds, and then become percussive as they track through his hairline. Will wants to shiver; wants to express his hatred of how close this is, and his body sits frustratingly limp yet responsive. He watches the water ripple and turn orange, and wills more of his blood to leak from him if it will only afford him more of a veil. His skin, all of it, still sits stubbornly visible as he hears Hannibal inhale, deep, at the top of his skull. He feels strands of hair lifting from his scalp with the vacuum of breath, and thinks that even his follicles are betraying him now; allowing themselves to be drawn in by Hannibal when he’s needing to escape him.

He might be used to losing, he thinks, as Hannibal dips a hand into the water and shells water over his collarbones, but he’s not used to doing it without fighting.

“Betrayal has a sting, doesn’t it?”

Will wishes he had more chemical in his system to mute the clarity of Hannibal’s voice.

Bullet wounds, Will thinks, sting the way any bullet wound would, and attributing the pain to his motivations and not the result is a cruelty he has learnt to associate with Hannibal, intimately.

There’s a glint of silver in Hannibal’s hand, and Will wonders how Hannibal will cut into him, this time. His head rests against the side of the bath as the silver adopts the shape of scisssors, and this seems unnecessarily brutal. He’d hoped it would be a cleaner implement; a scalpel, or glass skimmed across a jugular, perhaps.

He’s slow to consider that he might not deserve either option, and when the thought presents itself, he dismisses it as something wistful, not belonging to him.

The silver meets the bullet, and now, Will’s lungs find a way to scream. He’s pulled into the dry damp of Hannibal’s shirt, the noise clogged by fabric and his body finding no way to shake the rest of the shouting out of him. It sits in his chest, creeping, waiting. The scissors rummage through the bullet hole, scratching at the burnt threads of muscle and scraping bone. He’s held, again, as though to stop the movements he can’t make. Will stares at the water, watches the curdling of reds and oranges thinning in opacity, and he thinks he was misguided in thinking that the nakedness of his flesh was the most humiliating feature of his demise. Not with Hannibal inside him in ways more invasive than his biology should allow. There’s a tug, a scrape, a finger prying at the hole and the feeling of metal sliding against muscle. Hannibal pinches the metal between finger and thumb, and the grey of it, slicked with red, it seems to writhe in Hannibal’s grip like something that’s grudgingly crawling from him. Will watches Hannibal lean to inhale the surface of it, and Will closes his eyes as Hannibal purses his mouth at its domed end. He feels water in the wound, and he feels the water growing thicker and textured around the lip of it and he knows he shouldn’t look, not if he wants to limit the sense of horror contained in his skull.

He looks, and sees the swift withdrawal of tongue of someone trying not to spoil their appetite.

Will finds he doesn’t have the energy for horror, and instead conflates the sensation of water lapping his chest with the thought of resignation; he’s dead, he knows. He’s been dead for a while and all that was left to him was to play out a game that he was not equipped to win. He wills himself to sink, and wonders if this separation will go the way of Siamese twins; with the other wilting in the aftermath of severance, not knowing that the other had some vital tenet of survival that is now trapped in a decomposing shell. Will doesn’t know if the thought has any satisfaction to it.

The water sings in his eardrums and it dulls the repetition of his name, and the accompanying words of regretful respect. He feels his body dropping, and he’s grateful that he at least has enough movement in him for this. 

 

That Will is still breathing comes as a slow dawning surprise. The vibrancy of sensation in his skin resurges with a prick inside his neck, and he feels the familiar noise of protest climbing past his teeth.

_No_.

Hannibal is sponging at his skin, reverent and firm, folding knees and splaying toes with coarse flannel fibres.

He watches the ripples of skin under water as the purpled hues of his thighs, still dented from his fall, turn white with the flannel and then vivid as the cloth withdraws. He stares at the accents of yellow as the cloth snags on the hair of his groin, and he’s closing his eyes again as the water, then the cloth, and then fingers skim beneath his balls and each hypersensitised cell of his cock answers the controlled touch of Hannibal’s cleaning. Hannibal stills, waits, and Will feels time like a swirl around him that pins him to a vortex. He considers that any death Hannibal has planned for him would have more dignity to it than this, and he feels heat rising in his face where he didn’t think he had any left in him.

“So many things you could have learned” Hannibal is saying, and Will’s cheeks are damp as well as hot and it takes a moment, a thinning of the nerves, to realise that Hannibal’s hand has withdrawn and that he’s being pushed forward, water sprawling across his back, and now Hannibal is telling him that he had hoped, still, to learn from Will.

He’s pulled from the bath and he won’t _look_ ; won’t see if he’s subdued the reaction that his cramping body is telling him he hasn’t. He’s being carried, again, only this time he’s draped over Hannibal’s shoulder and there’s a hand too high up his thigh for this not to feel more intimate than just practicality. The sensation of falling follows, and this time his back meets a towel, layered over dense mattress and covers and by now, Will is not naïve enough to thing that this new pose might equate to any form of rest. The lights on the ceiling sprinkle patterns of illumination over skin and walls and all of their forms blurring into each other. He wonders if a coffin would feel as soft, and then wonders if there will be enough left of him to arrange in one.

“There’s a simplicity in monochrome” Hannibal tells him, and he sounds like a shadow again. “It matches the hardest edges of your perceptions of morality.”

The moisture is lapped from Will’s skin by the towel, bunches of it wiping and massaging his skin and his limbs lifted to afford it more efficacy. Something padded is taped to the opening of his shoulder and his skin bristles.

“I think you’d appreciate the symbolism” Hannibal says, and he’s made flesh again, pulling clothes into Will’s line of vision.

Will wants to be assured that the promise of clothing means an extension of the minutes he’ll be allowed to remain breathing. The thought never manifests into anything tangible, and he’s being pulled so his legs dangle from the edge of the bed, his feet pulled through fabric trappings, and black, heavy trousers dragged up the skin of his legs, the waistband resting open some inches from the top of his thighs. Hannibal is a clinical thing in this moment; calculating and assessing the tidiest logistics with which to solve a simple problem, and Will stares again at the scattered trails of light on the ceiling as fingertips pull socks over the heels of his feet.

“I’m curious. Did you imagine what would happen after the success of your venture? Or were you merely blinded by impulse?”

Will wants to answer; wants to focus on words and how to force his throat to make them, as an alternative to the blunt pressing of fingers at his hips, lifting him upwards and pulling the trousers past the curve of his butt, and the more gentle press of fingers tucking him away from the zipper, pulling the button to a sharp close and then skimming the shining indent of his scar. If Will’s voice was more than a shaking breath and a tongue too heavy for movement, he’d ask Hannibal the same. Maybe then, they’d both realise that a concept of future is too intangible a thing for either of them.

“I am genuinely sorry for this, Will.”

Will is pushed to a wilted sitting position, arms slung forward and wrists dangling from the bed. His left arm is pulled through a sleeve, and the fabric is smoothed over his back.

“Careful” Hannibal adds, as though Will had any accountability for his movements. His right arm is folded, and the bullet wound blooms fresh heat at the action and Will finds that even his eyes have given up reacting to the pain; he will play this out as a mute participant in his own fate. He lets Hannibal tuck the folds of white into the black of his trousers, lets him push his feet into shoes which sit too wide over his foot, and lets him secure a belt to the waistband, only briefly surprised that the belt doesn’t find his neck instead. If he thinks of himself as letting this happen, then really, he has some sway in its outcome. The word _no_ has not spared him anything yet, and so he discards it, and thinks only of how, if he had been given opportunity to act out the terms of their goodbye, he would have spared Hannibal the theatre of humiliation disguised as neutrality.

He lets Hannibal lift him from the bed, carry him to the dining room, and thinks that, if he had been able to decide for them both, he would have made it a clean cut, and not this hollowing out.  

He lets Hannibal arrange him on the chair, and permits him the strap that pins his chest in place, and he waits.

 

2.

_Muskrat Farm_

 

Will isn’t sure that the word headache is adequate, right now.

He’s been blinking blood out of his eye for hours, and now he can feel the crisp shells of congealed red on his face, and he’s growing to resent the way his body will keep him lucid through circumstances that should have seen him dead.

The drugs Hannibal had gifted him have long since worn off, and now he’s confronted with a theoretical ability to move, or would be were it not lashed in by the straps and buckles of Mason’s wheelchair. He thinks he should be grateful that at least he’s no longer seconds from death, and that now, the blood is pooling from his head, not to it.

Gratitude, Will thinks, is pointless.

So, too, is any form of reaction.

The slow loosening of his tongue is a secret he has kept to himself; he was mute when they were collected, and has remained this way throughout their transportation and brief parade. Mason, and the mobile surrogates for his sadism, thrive on pleading and reactions. Will has already vowed to offer them neither.

The only sincerity to Will’s gratitude has been for Hannibal’s shared silence. There are no words, Will thinks, which could be spat from that man’s interior that would provide any form of resolution. He imagines that this knowledge is shared with Hannibal; that neither would humour anything so trite as apology or reassurance. They’re in a different game now, and the resetting of the scores between them is ill comfort. Will watches as Hannibal is wheeled away from the pen, Mason close behind him, and watches through lowered eyelids for whatever is to follow.

Mason’s absence is neither a plus nor a minus. Mason has a need to narrate each proposed act of cruelty, and his role as orator would remove some of the mystery, but would be spurred on to greater magnitudes of violence were the reaction not satisfactory. Will knows that his reaction will _not_ be satisfactory.

The two men who remain are _almost_ unknown quantities; there’s Cordell, who has every impression of being a lapdog facsimile of Hannibal, and there’s an inherent loathsomeness to his frequently delivered smiles. The second man has not been introduced by name, and Cordell seems satisfied with this; there’s power in titles and handles. The second man is lean, smartly dressed, neatly shaved, with angles to his face and a burden of frustration buried in his dark-eyed glances; he exudes the discomfort of one who has found an environment in which to vent some of his urges, but hankers after the freedom to fully explore them without confines. Will has met men like this one, through the pages of texts and through the bars of police cells, and he accepts that if this is the sum of humanity that his life has been focused on, it seems only fitting that it should be present for his death, too.

“You will need to be cleaned for…dinner” Cordell tells Will, and the two men are regarding him with enforced patience. Whatever the unspoken cue they are waiting for, Will is confident that it is not to come from him. He blinks a slow acknowledgment and waits.

“You’re not the course, of course” Cordell continues, languishing in his own voice while the second man stares at the straps of Will’s arms. “But appearances are important to Mr Verger. And yours is…not setting the tone for what he would like from you.”

The second man offers a small smile to Cordell. Cordell answers with a gestured wave of fingers, and the man walks out of view, makes a small sound of exertion and returns with a black case, the unseen contents of which pull a more genuine curve to his mouth. 

“Is it clear?” he asks Cordell.

Cordell checks a device in his pocket, nods, smiles again with wet fondness for the circumstance, and leads the way from the pen, following the same route Hannibal had cleared some minutes before.

The wheels grind across uneven floor and Will tells himself again that he will not react, no matter what awaits him.

“One thing I need to explain” Cordell states, as they enter a room with tubing on the walls, hooks in the ceiling and tiles and drains in the ground, “Where Mason is not able to participate, he still wishes to be informed of proceedings, in detail.”

The second man turns Will to face the entrance they’d passed and nudges his shoulder.

Will doesn’t react beyond letting his eyelids flicker and his jaw tense, as the bullet hole screams inside his skin. He follows the line of sight of the second man to a camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling, and feels his resolve to remain stoic thickening into a desperate need.

“He’s very particular about merchandise.”

Will is turned back to face the room, and to see the ceiling hook lowering to chest height.

Cordell and the second man remove their jackets in unison, folding them and arranging them somewhere behind Will’s line of sight, and the delay in their return; just a handful of seconds that Will counts out in breaths he plans to keep steady; appears to be for his benefit. He’s supposed to read the potential into the hook, and the steel tubes, and the drain beneath where Will imagines he will shortly be positioned. It’s supposed to instil fresh terror in him, and had he not experienced the full brunt of abject fear some hours before, Will thinks that it might have worked.

Cordell and the second man blur into focus, each grabbing a strap of black belt and wrapping it behind the tethers already securing Will’s wrists to the wheelchair. As one of the chair straps loosens, the new strap tightens in answer until Will’s forearms are pressed together and his shoulders hunch across his collarbone. He’s focussing on gritting out his breathing and counting to four before he inhales, clenching his jaw to stop the reactive gasp that would otherwise emerge. He’s wheeled closer to the hook, now dangling at waist height, and the straps across his chest and legs loosen. Another loop wraps across his wrists, and he’s linked to the hook this way, arms out in front of him and body ready to cave from inactivity.

“You should be grateful for the camera” Cordell tells him, and Will is starting to feel a keen hatred towards all concepts of gratitude as he’s turfed from the chair and his knees find the tiled floor before he can balance. He’s held by the awkward angle of his wrists in front of him and his back in a convex arch, elbows pointed to the drain. He’s straddled from behind, not by Cordell, and cold metal that now feels more familiar than his skin scrapes the back of his neck.

There’s a tug, and a rip, and the shirt falls from his back to hang limp over his tensed arms.

“He” gestures Cordell to the man behind him, “wanted to piss on you.” Will’s sleeves are pulled taut, then cut. “But Mr Verger thought it would be tasteless.”

Will doesn’t use the angle of his head to the floor to let any revulsion escape him. He considers bucking the second man off him, from where he’s pressed too close into his bare skin, and then decides it would not earn him any sort of victory.

“And we’re supposed to get you _clean_ ” the second man says, his voice casual and contradictory to the way Will can feel him tense against him. Too tense, and too stiff.

The knife dips into the back of Will’s trousers, resting sharp against the cleft of skin and Will remains silent, counts out four seconds of exhale and feels the metal leave his skin and tear through fabric.

“Commando” comments the second man, and Will doesn’t feel the need to protest that it wasn’t by any form of choice. He feels the burn of fabric against his wrists and focuses on the way that his head is throbbing and considers that, despite the obvious causes, he may also be dehydrated. He offers the men the smallest of flinches when the knife flicks into the skin of his leg, and he’s steady again in half an elevated heartbeat. He watches dumbly as fabric pools beneath him, and when the hook is tugged to raise his arms higher, he follows the motion obediently as the weight of the second man drops from his legs. He’s standing, now, naked, head down, wrists slightly higher than his head and a weeping from the wound in his shoulder.

“Almost ready” announces the second man as straps are fitted to each ankle, until they’re splayed just beyond a shoulder width, and each strap is secured to a point outside the periphery of Will’s floor-angled stare.

There’s silence, and then footfalls, dimming, and Will balances his weight between the heels of his feet, tests the amount of give in the ankle straps and deems it inadequate for kicking, or for a knee to the face of whichever man gets closest first. He tests the movement of his arms, gritting his teeth as he contemplates the angle he’s need to contort into in order to jam an elbow into a neck, and the sharp sting of his shoulder warns him of the sacrifice it would mean. Will doesn’t rule it out. There’s so little of his self left to preserve that it seems a fair trade-off, if it’s needed.

The creak of footfalls returns, and this time, both men are wearing plastic coats, gloves, and visors with face shields, and Will understands that this is part of the dehumanisation process; that he is to be treated as the pigs are, with only slightly more care taken for the ritual of it.

One length of tubing is pulled from the back wall and held by Cordell, the second tube held by the other man. They position themselves on opposing sides, Cordell in front, and even through the visor, his smile is a visible, creeping thing.

It starts when water hits Will’s back in an unsteady spatter, and there’s a lurch, and it heaves into a stream, heavy and spewing like liquefied bruising. It’s met by Cordell’s hose, and it’s like drilling, and Will wonders if they’re avoiding his face because they’re hoping that the pressure of it against his wound dressing would be enough to make him cry.

It should be.

_It isn’t_.

The path of the water shifts; grinds at his toes, his calves, and Cordell maps a steady path up Will’s legs as the second man keeps the pressure in the small of Will’s back.

Will follows the trajectory of Cordell’s stream and chews on the inside of his cheek in anticipation of the inevitable. The first spray of it skims the hair of his groin, almost a tickle as the water on his back dips lower.

Then, it hits his balls.

Will knows he hasn’t screamed, because he hasn’t opened his mouth and he can taste blood from where he’s bitten the inside of his cheek to keep the sound buttoned in.

“Very good” he hears and he swears he can feel the skin of his dick splitting from the pressure, and he’s looking upwards at the length of chain keeping the hook in place, and at the way his wrists look pink and he’s thinking that if he gets out of here, he could comfortably cut the skin from each of these men and feel not even passing remorse. As the water at his back powers lower, catching where he’s desperately trying to stay still, because he _promised_ himself he would, because he _can’t_ give in to anything as crude and ugly as a treatment devised by Mason, Will’s eyes feel damp and he knows it’s not from the spray of the hose. He can still feel that at his opening, forcing the skin to flinch and shake under it, at his groin and drowning him slowly, and something wet drops from his eyes and he hates himself, for this.

It’s seen by Cordell, and the hose travels away from where Will imagines himself torn, shredded, and somehow the idea of taking refuge in the stream of his mind palace is a thing too tainted to process.

Will lets the spray of it hit his face and finds the pain of it welcomed, this time.

He knows, _knows_ , he shouldn’t begrudge himself one small reaction, and in the same wet breath he denies that he should even feel anything at all; it’s a reaction he keeps reserved for Hannibal, and for the ways Hannibal has crept inside each space of his that he’d held sacred.

The spray thins, and Cordell moves closer; puts a gloved hand to Will’s face and rubs as though scrubbing the remnants of blood from him, and Will looks past him so he won’t have to see his smile. Will has enough time to question his priorities, that he finds Hannibal’s invasions – more insidious, more harmful, but somehow more elegant, preferable to this. The moment ends with the withdrawing of all hands, all water, and the relaxed retreating of the two men to where the tubes line the wall. The other man grabs a second; a wider looking thing, and Will’s expression is steel. He makes no outward indication of bracing as Cordell fiddles with a dial at its stump, and his insides begin to unclench when this hose unleashes nothing more sinister than warm billowing air. He glances downwards, finds himself intact, and inhales three seconds of cloying heat.

“Mr Verger said you’d have more bite to you” Cordell shouts over the drone and Will only closes his eyes, in answer, or defeat. “Keep this up and we’ll have no trouble getting you dressed, hmm?”

Will’s skin feels hollowed out, puckered, and not like anything that belongs to him as the dryer hose is tucked away. He lets himself hang limp against the straps of his wrists and watches the last trickle of water hit the drain, caught by the sodden bandage from his shoulder.

He’ll allow them to dress him, he thinks. He’ll allow himself to be strapped back into the chair, transported to the house, and he’ll allow whatever performance Mason requires from him, to a point. This, he decides, has been a re-education about where he thought the point was.

He lets himself be folded back into the chair, no longer concerned that his nakedness will be paraded through whichever route to the house they take. He’s allowing this, and his fight is in the way he offers no words, no protests or pleas. And, when he is confronted by anything he cannot allow, then, he tells himself, then he’ll find a way to fight back.

 

3. 

_Wolf Trap_

 

The cold of Maryland sinks into Will as a surprise; the sweating heat of the operating theatre had held with it a kind of oppression that he equated with a descent into hell, and though Will would normally find a gaucheness to such comparisons, he doesn’t think that his feelings on the experience should be confined to perceptions of normality, anymore.

He tries to count the hours he’s been awake for, matching each hour with every thud of Hannibal’s footfalls in the snow. He loses count after only two; his emergence from the table, largely uncut, had presented him with too huge a dismantling of where reality and all its trappings existed.

He focuses, instead, on the way his back is held flush against Hannibal’s arms, of how the shirt, offered by Alana while he lay immobilised beneath piles of restraints, is a thin barrier against winter. Of how the beating in Hannibal’s chest is a heavy strolling thing, rolling through the both of them and Will wonders if they’ve fallen into a symbiosis so powerful that his own heart has given up.

The thought is an unpleasant one, and Will finds himself staring at the stars, at the inverted view of tree tops and the wispy crystals of falling ice as a way to cleanse his mental palate. He thinks Hannibal would appreciate the way his mind still jumps to analogies of consumption and flavour, and he’s glad that in his moment his throat is still subject to the same paralysis that almost saw him dead. _Almost_. Will worries that he’d articulate his gratitude for being carried out of the farm alive, and he remembers that he had to be careful about what gratitude really means.

“I made a promise to save you” Hannibal says, and his voice is a cracked thing, made ragged by methods unseen by Will, but easily imagined.

“I mean to uphold this” Hannibal says, and Will takes the fact of his still present breath to be the proof of this. It’s just, he knows, that Hannibal has been trying to save him since they met, and Hannibal is many things; but saviour is not one that Will can consolidate with his own desire to _live_.

He’d watched Hannibal take Mason apart in a grotesquely personal way, and handle it with clinical indifference. As Will had lain mute and still and seeing it all, he hadn’t felt the swell of relief that retribution brings. He’d felt an empathetic terror; that no matter who Mason was, it was, in that moment, who _Hannibal_ was that had dictated the outcome. That Hannibal had seen no fault in his actions to invade Mason, with the complicity of Margot and Alana facilitating, Will felt his own vulnerability amplified back at him. Will felt echoes in his throat from tubes, and he’d felt knives and needles and saws reverberating through his skin as memories still too raw to be subject to analysis.  

“In this moment, I imagine we are both experiencing the closest sense of safety we have known in a long time” Hannibal says, and Will doesn’t know where they are going beyond _away from the farm_ , but he hopes that Hannibal will use his breath for walking, not for getting inside the coils of his brain with means more insidious than weapons.

“You must be tired” Hannibal says next, as though he were an observer to Will’s plight and not a participant in his own. Will doesn’t think that tiredness is an adequate descriptor. He wants to raze the experiences that have brought him this far to nothing. He wants to purge the man from his thoughts, because if he lets him have any more room inside those alcoves of his mind, he’ll turn him more wretched than he is now. He’ll be present in the moments where people are killed, and Will won’t know whether it’s Hannibal expressing satisfaction, or whether it’s him. Will thinks of Cordell, of how he’d been alive, subject to the same paralysis as Will, as Hannibal had sliced and peeled the flesh of his face off in tribute, and Will knows that he’d felt a flurry of appreciation for the act, and Will worries that it was his own response.

“You can rest” Hannibal tells him, and the sway and lull of his limbs loose in Hannibal’s grasp are an ugly lullaby, but the _cold_ , and the _sting_ of it all…

Hannibal walks, and Will lets his head drop back, and lets himself fall into the clutches he’d tried to sever for himself.

 

When Will wakes, it’s warm. The air smells different, and his skin feels wet. There’s a moment, quiet, serene and empty, where the thoughts of his circumstance have yet to manifest. It dissipates with the sight of a hand on the edge of a bathtub – _his_ bathtub – and fingers resting on his collarbone.

Will splashes, finds that his arms are working again, slowly but with more agency than any part of him has been permitted since Florence. He doesn’t feel comfortable in water, right now, and his thoughts are quick to gather in reminder of why this is.

He’s prying Hannibal’s fingers from his skin and pushing himself out of the tub, his legs bending with an absence of strength or coordination. Hannibal chooses to help, and Will lets him; nothing is said, as though words could fracture the uneasy trust caused only by dependency. He folds into the towel as it’s reached for, cocoons himself in it, and doesn’t look Hannibal in the eyes. It’s not shame that he’s afraid of. It’s understanding, and in this moment, Will doesn’t want to be understood. He’s fitted more horror under the surface of his skin than even Hannibal knows, now. He lets Hannibal steer him to the bed, and accepts the gentle motions made to dry his skin. His head lolls forward, and he thinks he isn’t sure that he remembers being awake at all. He lifts his arms before realising he was instructed to do so, and wriggles into the t-shirt, noticing the fresh bandage that sits on his shoulder as it’s covered by the stretch of fabric. He lets Hannibal tuck his arms into an overshirt and when it’s on his back, he sinks into the pillow, watching Hannibal push buttons through holes. He’s letting this happen, because it’s easier than not.

And he’s allowing it in the knowledge that a kicked dog can still be grateful when its owner feeds it. It doesn’t mean the dog has to stay. Will thinks, as the warmth of the blanket drapes over him, that he’s endured enough kicking, for now.  

**Author's Note:**

> Story title is taken from Of Montreal’s _The Past is a Grotesque Animal_ , which is an 11 minute 52 second musical epic with too many lyrical parallels to this goddamn ship that stealing a line for a title was inevitable. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
